Access and usage of data communications services have greatly increased. One important area in which growth has occurred is in the area of online applications, which are application programs that are designed to interact with an online user. One important function of online applications involves gathering information from an online user, in particular by presenting one or more forms to be filled out by the user. For example, forms may be used by applications including personal information management, e-commerce, etc. A key usability issue with online forms is the capability for a user to fill out much or all of a form automatically, to have the automatic process be reliable and easy to use, and to have the automatically entered information be accurate.
Recently, online applications have been extended to use with mobile devices. Mobile devices present special issues in the usability of online applications. For example, mobile devices then to have small display screens, limited keyboard entry capabilities, and voice interfaces. With these types of devices, usability is essential and it becomes even more important for online applications to provide automated form-filling capabilities.
One solution to automated form-filling, which has been used in the non-mobile environment, is to download software, such as a “wallet” or “form-filler”, onto a user's computer, where the software is installed as a plugin on top of the user's browser software. However, a problem arises with this approach in a mobile environment, because mobile devices tend to be small and have limited memory, making plugins of any significant size impractical or unusable.
Another problem arises in the way that conventional form-fillers function. A typical conventional form-filler operates by guessing at matches among fields in a form, which are to be filled-in, and fields in a wallet, which contain information that may be used to fill-in the form fields. Guess-based form filling may not provide adequate reliability in a form-filling application. As an alternative to guessing, some form-filling applications involve a formal relationship between the presenter of the form and the developer of the form-filler, which allows the mappings among the form fields and the wallet fields to be known. This approach provides reliability, but does not provide easy scalability or expandability, because commercial relationships must be established among all parties in order to provide the functionality.
A need arises for a technique by which automated form-filling can be provided to mobile devices that provides reliable and accurate information to the forms, is easy to use, and is scaleable.